Salman Rushdie returns with soul-searching short stories: Nine Authentic Ghost Stories
Nine Authentic Ghost Stories is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Nine Authentic Ghost Stories Introduction by Kirsty Logan (Bodleian Library £12.99, 128pp)
Originally published in 1886 and reprinted with an introduction by fiction fan Kirsty Logan, these deliciously dark tales have the hallmarks of classic ghost stories.
Each of the nine anonymous tales are short in length, narrated in simple prose, with contemporary settings and are told as if they were factual and true – like urban legends.
It ramps up the tension as the narrators describe encounters with spectres and eerie portraits of elderly relatives, learn of murderous deeds and buried bodies and receive a beyond the grave letter, composed by a lover with a guilty conscience.
Perfect fireside reading for dark, winter evenings.
Pulse by Cynan Jones (Granta £14.99, 192pp)
Jones’s searing stories are freighted with emotional weight. The characters are rooted in their desire to survive adverse circumstances and their own mistakes and flaws.
Dealing with fear and vulnerability, these stories head for the gut and the heart.
Jones’s precise prose and the spaces between his sentences lend the stories a pulse that thrums through these powerful tales of men trying to cope as they hunt bears, shoot ducks, witness the traumatic birth of a calf, or rob a peregrines’ nest.
But there are moments of beauty too, as seen by the narrator of Stock, who remembers how ‘he used to think the sun rose because the birds called to it, sung it up’.
The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape £18.99, 272pp)
Fate, soul-searching, philosophy and culture play their parts in Rushdie’s quintet of stories.
Set in places the author has lived in – India, England, America – these tales tackle ageing, legacy and the mysteries of life, with a dash of magical realism and the lyrical prose that has made Rushdie famous.
He returns to Bombay with a tale of revenge, billionaires and a supernaturally talented pianist in The Musician of Kahani, as an ill-fated marriage brings about a retribution.
Vengeance is the game in Late, a Cambridge-set ghost story, with shades of Alan Turing’s life, where a dead academic and live student reveal a long-hidden secret, while the opener, In The South, captures the bickering of octogenarian neighbours whose friendship is finally curtailed by death.